We have good news to share. Effective at the beginning of this month (February 1, 2013), Amazon RDS is lowering Multi-AZ deployment prices globally for MySQL and Oracle editions.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments offer enhanced availability for your production database workloads. When a database is run as a Multi-AZ deployment, Amazon RDS operates a standby instance which maintains an up-to-date copy of the primary database. In case of an instance, storage, or network failure, Amazon RDS automatically initiates a failover from the primary to the standby. This ensures minimal database availability impact to your application.

Today, many customers run production workloads on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments. However, we also know that there are many customers who‘ve wanted to run Amazon RDS Multi-AZ but haven’t been able to do so yet at the current price. So, we’re excited to lower our Amazon RDS Multi-AZ to make it even easier for customers to run production databases on Amazon RDS as Multi-AZ deployments.

For your quick reference, new pricing for an M1.Small instance for On-demand MySQL and Oracle (BYOL) Multi-AZ deployments is shown in table 1 below.